Adriana Sanfeliu

From the series Life on the Block, New York

A native of Barcelona, Spain, Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu moved to New York in 2002 to pursue a career in photography. Up until then, however, she had never taken a formal photography class. She enrolled in classes with Eugene Richards at the Maine Photographic Workshops and took a course at the school of the International Center of Photography, for which she began shooting a long term project in Spanish Harlem. Adriana is a  freelance photographer in New York City with a roster of clients that includes The New York Times, Newsweek, and Glamour. She earned degrees in Art History and Graphic Design in Barcelona before coming to NYC in the summer of 2001 to study Photography.

About the Photograph:

Since April of 2002, Adriana has been capturing the lives of young Puerto Rican women and their families in Spanish Harlem, NYC. “There is a hardness that characterizes these streets,” Adriana explains, “and innocence dies young.” She has spent the past four years developing the this project. To get “Life on the Block” off the ground Adriana just kept pushing it further. As she describes it, “After accomplishing a certain chapter I would take it to a higher level, from having an open outdoor projection to a formal gallery show. Always searching for my very personal vision and staying true to myself. Photography is a way of raising questions to engage dialogue. Bearing witness to people’s daily life helps to inform and educate, bringing awareness that stretches our collective mental boundaries, which in turn encourages and enables social change, growth and wholeness.”

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